The Sky was Blue the Sea was Blue and the Boy was Blue

‘The boy, lying naked and blue on the sand like a broken doll, the sea licking his feet… Our attention is completely focused on this strange figure, who, in death, has become frozen like a wooden saint…’ — Emily Spicer, Studio International

Inspired by Bastardia, a 2005 story by the celebrated Portuguese novelist, playwright and poet Hélia Correia, this work was created for Rego’s 2017–2018 Jerwood Gallery Hastings exhibition The Boy Who Loved the Sea and Other Stories. In Correia’s fateful tale, a boy who believes his father is the sea makes a journey to the ocean, which he has never seen before, experiencing a number of encounters and hardships along the way. This work depicts the story’s denouement, in which on reaching his destination the boy immediately dies: sky, sea and the boy’s lifeless body assume shades of blue.

Crowning of a Satyr (Blue), 2021, depicts a satyr with curved silvery horns being crowned by a female figure, the selkie. In Scottish mythology the selkie is a mythological creature who is able to transform from seal into human form by shedding its sealskin. Here, the selkie is visible in her female form, after the moment of metamorphosis; she is one with the water.

Joffe has often talked about her paintings in terms of transitions, those associated with growing and ageing, as well as her attempt to mark a life’s milestones. Esme in a Blue Skirt, 2014, depicts the artist’s daughter, eyes averted, one arm protectively covering her front, wearing a new blue skirt with appliqué animals. It touches on a key theme of Joffe’s art – the shifting relationship between mother and daughter over time, navigating spaces, dynamics and roles.

‘The mountains blue now

at the back of my head,

such geography of self and soul

brought to such limit of sight…’

— Robert Creeley, The Mountains in the Desert

This painting depicts the artist’s husband, the writer, philosopher and poet Steven Kupfer, alone in a rowing boat in Lake Altaussee in Austria, a place the couple have visited for many years, renting a hut on the shore. Rising up before him is the Trisselwand mountain, the upwards movement as the eye is drawn through the blues of water, earth and air enhanced by the vertical format of this jewel-like painting.

By the early 1960s Milton Avery was working almost exclusively from his in-home studio with a bird’s-eye view of Central Park. This city dwelling was an ideal setting for frequent gatherings and he continued to be an active observer of visitors, distilling characteristics with refined simplicity. Two Poets is one of the last large-scale paintings completed by the artist and is masterful in its simplicity, by turns modest and monumental.

To create works such as The Wave, 2011, Pindell drew upon her extensive collection of photographs taken while travelling, postcards she purchased, as well as other ephemera from her trips. Gravitated to what she describes as ‘more natural shapes’, she arranged these asymmetrically, often fanning multiple images of the same location in patterns to create a sense of compression or expansion that, allied to her own embodied experience, shifts the viewer’s perspective.

‘Blue has an immediate effect on emotion. I think it can have a positive or negative effect on the eye.’— Idris Khan

So many all of nothing, 2020, is a large-scale painting featuring passages of texts in which Khan expresses thoughts, feelings and responses to 2020. Diaristic in nature, these texts, once repeated and layered in sonorous blue oil, are distilled, a number fragmentary experiences and disparate ideas becoming a single image.

Afterimage, referring to the effect where an image continues to appear in our vision after exposure to the original image has ceased, also alludes to the filmic idea of the persistence of vision, where the afterimage fills in the gaps between film frames, setting still images into motion in our perception and memory.

‘Greens, blues, deep red and other vivid tints clash and commingle in lapidary facets, by turns glinting and sombre, that bear a resemblance to landscapes by Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele.’— David Anfam

‘There is a tendency for water and the sea to be spoken about as female – fluid and soft but also capricious and destructive. I like the potential for strength or force in that association…’— Flora Yukhnovich

New paintings created especially for this exhibition take their initial inspiration from Boucher’s Triumph of Venus, 1740, which depicts Venus, seated in a seashell, surrounded by sea creatures and representations of love, such as dolphins, tritons, naiads and cupids.

‘I wanted to create washed paintings that refer to the blue found in nature, or even the blue that encompasses our inner lives – complete with beauty but also distress or violence.’ — Secundino Hernández

‘I can imagine these forms as monumental sculptures carved into a wall… At the same time the painting also makes me think of the blue light we all consume from our screens and phones.’ — Ali Banisadr

The history of lapis lazuli, mined in the mountains of Badakhshan (in modern-day Afghanistan) and exported to Europe and beyond along the trade routes, is one of connections across continents and cultures that finds parallels in Banisadr’s work, where influences and ideas flow back and forth in time and contemporary resonances inhabit ancestral forms.

Often, as in the work on display, de Balincourt’s paintings hinge on utopian/dystopian narratives, structures of power or opposing forces. At the same time, they carve a space of reflection and contemplation against a tide of contemporary media.

Shadows of the Moon proposes the almost sci-fi idea of there being more than one moon, perhaps moving in different directions (the artist cites as a source of inspiration Haruki Murakami’s alternate reality novel 1Q84) and how life, as a measure of time and movement, might change.

In these works, feelings of dislocation are heightened by the dramatic use of collage, where enigmatic figurative and abstract elements are brought together on metallic foils. These elements – in colours such as silver, gold, copper and blue – create an unreal, dream-like effect and shift the work beyond the photographic into a compelling territory of hybrid materiality.

May, 2020, which was painted over one month last year, features one of the most enduring images of the current Covid pandemic – a blue surgical glove. The blue gloved hand reaches into a blue space, in search of something that remains tantalisingly out of reach and out of view.

‘I have lots of paintings that fantasise about the sea and ships… It’s a metaphor about getting lost and found.’— Tal R

This work draw parallels between architectural space, clothing and the body, making explicit Suh’s fascination with the interconnected spaces we inhabit while continuing his career-long investigation into the porous boundaries of identity.

‘People are very wedded to the idea of a neat ending: our rational brains would love us to tidy up the mess of the world and to have either Armageddon or Heaven at the end of our existence. But life doesn’t work like that – it’s a continuum.’— Grayson Perry